Zachar Laskewicz : Represented Artist

Zachàr Laskewicz was born in Western Australia in 1971 with roots from a mixture of Slavic and other European countries, including Belorussia, Ireland, the Ukraine and Montenegro. As a child, choosing between music and drama was a difficult one; in the end he chose both and achieved a Bachelor degree in theatre and drama studies, a first license in experimental composition from the Royal Conservatory of Ghent, a graduate diploma in linguistics, a PhD in the Arts at the University of Ghent, A Post Doctoral Certificate in World Music and finally (and most recently) a Masters of Letters from the University of Central Queensland (where he majored in Gender Studies and Queer Theory). Somewhere in between all that he started a Balinese Gamelan Orchestra at the Indonesian Embassy in Brussels, picked up a degree in multimedia management, achieved the Dutch proficiency certificate and went to teach literature and theatre to the Taiwanese (in English) and after that music composition to the Chinese (in Mandarin). He has had work performed in Finland, Singapore, Australia, Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark and Russia.

Laskewicz returned to Ghent in 2006 where he now lives and works. He sees himself as a creative artist who uses multimedial musicality as his primary medium of expression. He sees himself as a composer, performer, theoretician film–maker, designer of graphic art and poet, although he feels that music will always remain the primary reason to express his art. In 2007 he brought out 3 DVDs of his piano performance/dance/choeography experiments involved with the vital link connecting movement and music, clear demonstration of the refinement of Asian dance, and a respectful parody of the somewhat exaggerated romantic tradition of piano playing. Recently, the release of a new DVD Zvotslipas Umatslipit [the Painstaking Cycle: a language course for a fictive language] which is in every way a total ‘music–theatre film’, allowed his interest in music, language, performance and theatre to come together in a unique fashion and provide new forms of metanarrative. Laskewicz welcomes contact and debate over any of the subjects he has particular standpoints on, and loves to share information and techniques he has developed with others.